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Tuna Again? In Fault-Finding England, It’s a Cause for Divorce

LONDON — In her 30-odd years as a divorce lawyer, Vanessa Lloyd Platt has heard it all. The woman who sued for divorce because her husband insisted she dress in a Klingon costume and speak to him in Klingon. The man who declared that his wife had maliciously and repeatedly served him his least favorite dish, tuna casserole.

“It’s insane,” Ms. Lloyd Platt said. “These things should not have any part in the procedure.”

But they come up all the time in England, which unlike every state in America does not have a no-fault divorce law.

In one recent case, the husband accused his wife of spitefully tampering with the TV antenna and throwing away his cold cuts. She said he usurped her control of the washing machine and failed to appreciate her revulsion for “intensely farmed meat.”

As the couple, Susan and Douglas Rae, aired the mundane details of their imploding marriage last month in London’s Court of Appeal, the judge in the case criticized English divorce law for allowing such picayune matters to become an issue at all.

If the government had enacted past proposals to allow no-fault divorce, the judge, Justice Matthew Thorpe, told the court, “there would have been no need for these painful investigations, which seem to represent the social values of a bygone age.”

He granted Mr. Rae’s petition for divorce, despite Mrs. Rae’s argument that their problems were “normal squabbling between husband and wife” and not deal-breakingly bad.

Under current English law, divorces are granted only under one of five categories, including adultery and abandonment. About half of the cases fall under the heading of a broad category called unreasonable behavior, in which one party has to accuse the other of acting so unreasonably that living together has become intolerable.

Many divorce lawyers and judges have long chafed at the requirement, and some like Ms. Lloyd Platt are campaigning to change the law to allow no-fault divorce. In a speech last month, Justice Nicholas Wall, president of the family division of England’s high court, said that “I see no good arguments against no-fault divorce.”

Inspired by Justice Thorpe’s remarks, Ms. Lloyd Platt compiled a list in The Times of London of some of the odder accusations of fault she and other lawyers have come across in divorce petitions.

In addition to the Klingon man, there was a woman who said her husband had not spoken to her for 15 years, communicating only by Post-it note. And there was the man whose wife “would without justification flirt with any builder or tradesman, inappropriately touching them and declaring that she could not stop herself.”

One petition read: “The respondent insisted that his pet tarantula, Timmy, slept in a glass case next to the matrimonial bed,” even though his wife requested “that Timmy sleep elsewhere.”

There were complaints about husbands with atrocious body odor and others who changed the channels too fast. “The respondent husband repeatedly took charge of the remote television controller, endlessly flicking through channels and failing to stop at any channel requested by the petitioner,” one petition read.

In England, few divorce cases go to trial, so the parties have to work out — either amicably or unamicably — who is at fault and why. The reasons, which appear in the papers filed by the person seeking the divorce, have no bearing on eventual financial or custody arrangements, except in extreme cases, lawyers say. But they still have to be approved by a judge, which is where some chicanery may come in, lawyers here say.

“People have had to start playing games with this, with the complicity of the court,” said Patrick Chamberlayne, a divorce lawyer in London. “They put their heads together and say, ‘Surely we can come up with something that the court will agree on.’ That’s when you get the sort of trivial nonsense like ‘He was late home from work’ and ‘He wasn’t supportive in the kitchen.’ ”

In some cases, though, the divorce petition is used as an “instrument of punishment,” Mr. Chamberlayne said.

“The more angry the person, the more they dislike the other person, the more likely you will find extreme examples of behavior. Sexual impropriety, extreme sexual behavior, every vice you can imagine, drugs, prostitution, homosexuality — the more wounded you are, the more this stuff pours out.”

People going through a divorce say the unreasonable behavior element just creates more trauma.

“It was a legal nicety which stuck the knife into the person who was suffering the most” — namely, he himself, said a 51-year-old writer in London whose now ex-wife filed for divorce about five years ago.

His wife “filed an official statement saying that I had taken no interest in my children, I had never done anything with them and was uncommunicative, uncooperative, un-everything,” said the writer, who asked not to be identified because of the personal nature of the issue. “It was just factually inaccurate. I said, ‘If you file that, I won’t settle anything,’ and she said, ‘I’m just being told by my lawyers to put that in to speed the whole thing up.’ ”

There was a push in 1996 for a no-fault divorce law, but the plan died amid worries that it would make divorce too easy.

“The bill would explicitly give us divorce on demand,” Edward Leigh, a Conservative member of Parliament, said in the debate at the time.

Liz Edwards, a family lawyer who is the chairwoman of Resolution, a group that supports conciliatory divorces, said that rather than making divorce too easy, the no-fault option merely removed some of its acrimony.

“Things are not black and white, so that making a judgment on who is at fault in the marriage, even when there’s been something like adultery, is difficult,” she said. One of her clients once told her that his wife hated the way he breathed.

How petitions are worded can make a huge difference. Sharon Bennett, a divorce lawyer in London, said that she advises her clients to use anodyne language or inoffensive trivialities. In one petition, a client said her husband was “obsessive in attention to detail and used to comb the fringes of the rug.”

Sometimes, Ms. Lloyd Platt said, it is hard to keep a straight face, as in the case of the petition claiming “the respondent is unreasonably demanding sex every night from the petitioner, which is causing friction between the parties.”

In another moment of unintended hilarity, a client complained that her husband was dressing up in her clothes and “stretching all her best outfits,” Ms. Lloyd Platt said. “When the gentleman came in and he was 6-3 — I found that particularly hard to deal with,” she said.

Correction: April 15, 2012

An article last Sunday about divorce laws in Britain described imprecisely where certain laws apply. While Scotland allows no-fault divorce, England, Wales and Northern Ireland do not. And the headline misidentified the jurisdiction for a case in which a man suing for divorce on the grounds that his wife maliciously and repeatedly served him his least favorite dish, tuna casserole. It was England, not Britain as a whole.

A version of this article appears in print on April 8, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Tuna Again? In Fault-Finding Britain, It’s a Cause for Divorce. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe